I've been looking into this. Any app that currently works should keep working, but new versions (especially new games, or new patches for games) may not. New versions of GPU drivers, DirectX and so on were a particular area of issue.

Good choice for a machine built for a particular purpose that doesn't need to run any new software.

Windows 10 IoT Enterprise 2021 LTSC Value - license - 1 license $110

https://www.cdw.com/product/windows-10-iot-enterprise-2021-l...

I'm a long time Linux user. I think the first version I installed was 0.11 back in the early-mid 90s. I worked in IT for most of my career until I retired a few years ago. After all that, I still don't have the patience to migrate to Linux. Between the games I enjoy and the music production software I'm used to using, is not worth the amount of time it requires fiddling with stuff. I wish it were different.

They moved the windows icon to the center

I'm not a fan of advertisements from my OS. I paid for it.

If I'm running Windows 11 Professional, I don't need the Windows Store to tell me I should check out Avowed Premium Edition in a meeting.

Or is somebody going to tell me it's my fault for leaving notifications on?

The TPM requirements rule out a lot of computers older than 5 years old.

With the pace of modern hardware development, a lot of these computers are still perfectly serviceable.

People are unhappy at being told to buy new hardware when they have working hardware.

(Other things that have concerned people: Further attempts to force people to microsoft accounts, more invasive copilot promotion, recall, A/B tested ads in explorer, etc.)

One example: they will throttle your hardware with energy efficiency mode and you CANNOT turn it off. Enjoy using 20% of what you paid for. Insane!

Windows 11 recently pushed an update to discontinue Windows Mixed Reality (WMR), bricking my <5 years old, $500 Reverb G2 VR headset, which I bought after Meta bought out Oculus and started requiring a Meta account, essentially bricking my Rift S. No thanks.

Nearly everyone in the world throws out stuff someone else could gladly reuse. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” is an old saying.

I’m not claiming I’d throw out a Windows 10 PC. I’d personally install Linux on it instead. But I can certainly imagine someone seeing nothing worth salvaging from a 10 year old PC and tossing it, and I can’t say they’re objectively wrong for doing it. Should they personally ship it to another country at some cost in fuel?

I think people are downvoting at your feigned incredulity at something not bizarrely “wrong” to a lot of people.

> Genuine question: In which country do you live where working Windows 10 PCs are sent to the landfill? [...] Nobody's throwing them away in the landfill when there's always a buyer/taker for them if you have patience

> Edit: would the downvoters care to explain themselves with some arguments?

I'll bite. I know many many many people who had all the era's of PC you mentioned. None of them still have them. None of them sold them. They may have put them on the curb, or "recycled" them, or sent them to the landfill - I don't know and it doesn't impact the fact that I don't know anyone who has a single one of them still in use.

This is easy to confirm by doing some order of magnitude math on how many of these machines were made (many), and how many are still in use (very few).

Regarding the Windows 10 specific question: it is still supported and receives updates, so of course they aren't going to landfill yet. The question is what will happen in a year or so once they are no longer supported (most non-techy users wont be installing LTSC). Spoiler: the vast majority of them will be sent to landfill or "recycler", not sold and kept in use.

Don’t edit to reply. This is a threaded forum.

But anyway, technology is so dense where I leave that you can’t give away some stuff. A 10 year old PC? Maybe. 15-20 years? No way, unless someone needs a specific part from it. There is zero demand otherwise for such a thing. There’s so much new tech that slightly older is nearly valueless locally.

Hi, not sure why you edited instead of replying - most of the time I would not see that at all, I just happened to come back to look.

If you hit a "throttle limit" as you said in a sibling comment - I don't know what that is, but you should take it as a helpful suggestion to post less, not circumvent by editting responses into comments.

> I asked how many people you know who throw in dumpsters working Windows 10 PCs, and you went on a tangent answered something completely different, in bad faith I would say.

Regarding bad faith arguments, see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - assume someone is responding in good faith. It's a boring and antagonistic discussion topic.

Anyway, I was responding in good faith to your comment in context, not in isolation. You asked about working windows 10 PCs going to landfill, yes - in a thread where the context is Microsoft discontinuing windows 10 security updates later this year. So no, I agree, working windows 10 PCs probably don't go to the landfill right now - but this situation will change in a year or two, and that is what the whole discussion is about. This was a good faith read on your whole comment, because you talked about all the different generations of PCs, from MS DOS to current, not just windows 10.

If you want only my comment about Windows 10 PCs, read the last paragraph of my other response.

> if you post an ad for a Pentium 3 PC now, someone will take it from you to use it

This is not accurate. Best case, someone might take it, pull the hard drive to try to find something valuable, and dump the rest in a dumpster.

I have a half dozen older PCs (MS-DOS, windows 95, ME, XP, XP) in various boxes. You're welcome to them if you'd like - I would have to pay someone to take them off my hands. This isn't a localized thing, either - I've lived in a number of developed countries (north america, east asia) and the same would apply in all of them. I would say your situation is the unusual one.

> There's no excuse to just throw working PCs in a landfill other than malice

If your PC isn't getting security updates, it is not working. I wouldn't use it for anything online, ever. And if I want to play an old game, emulation is lower energy cost than an old PC.

> 11, 8, Vista, Me ... It's a 25 year long pattern

Win2K might break that, it and XP were back to back.

That said, Neptune was an unfinished Win2k home version. Getting it booted = buggy funtime.

Nothing plugs a man's ears like money.

Steam is great. It’s allowed me to use an M1 Max laptop for gaming instead of maintaining a separate Windows PC for gaming.

I don’t game often and Windows ensured I didn’t want to by throwing roadblocks every time I booted the machine.

At least every Mac and Linux machine I’ve owned has happily booted into a working OS no matter how long it sat. Windows tried to upgrade my machine to Windows 11 without my consent, when it already knew my machine didn’t support it. That was fun.

My neighbor got permanently locked out of her laptop because Microsoft somehow attached her dead husband’s email account to her local account despite him having never logged in on that machine. I wasn’t able to figure out how to fix it.

Someone needs to come up with a Steam for AD DCs.

Explorer around Win98, I think as part of IE4, got the capability of hosting a web page in an explorer window (or part of it anyway for things like showing details) but it wasn't the control used for actually navigating through files. They did try and simulate it by allowing files to be single click to open and giving them blue underlines. MS kept using good ol' list views up through today for most of it. It is in the newer experiences where they're thrashing about and adding galleries, suggestions, and whatever will get someone promoted.